Aperture 2.0: the Ars Technica review

It has been over two years since Apple released Aperture 1. 1.5.

RAW quality

The differences between the Aperture 1.1 and 2 RAW engines are significant. The first thing you will notice is the difference in color handling. Aperture 1.1 could definitely be considered heavy on the saturation and contrast. While some people like their images supersaturated, it could get a little out of hand. The image below shows this pretty clearly. Just converting it to RAW 2.0 gave me this:

I like yellow as much as the next guy, but those hard edges in the transitions and the supersaturated halo around the sun are just nasty. The clouds and the water in the RAW 2.0 image have really nice smooth, believable highlights and sit in the image, not on it. It's for this reason that the RAW Fine Tuning options in Aperture 2 now includes a Hue Boost option. If you want supersaturated, it can still be done, but you'll have to work extra hard to lose details.

The
big showdown

Here we are again—the RAW comparison using Aperture 2, Bibble Pro 4.9.9b, Capture One 4.0.1, and Lightroom 1.3.1 (Camera RAW 2.4); all comparison images are available in a zip files of varying size (hint: they're large). It's like the nerd Olympics where we all gather to see the applications fight it out in the main events: noise suppression, sharpening, stuck pixel suppression, demosaicing, and finally, shot put. All images are unadjusted and untweaked other than to obtain the best balance of sharpness and low noise so you can see what the color rendering of each app is by default. Destination profile is sRGB and Perceptual rendering intent. When reading the short summaries, don't think I rushed through these—each test suite took about two hours total of tweaking. How was your weekend?

The results here are very similar between all the programs. With Aperture 2.0, I couldn't get too sharp before it started to pick up noise with the Edge Sharpen filter. This is as good as I could get it before the noise became a problem, despite using the Moire and Noise Reduction filters. It's a nice, clean image, but it's going to need external post-processing before going to print because of the noise and softness. The Bibble Pro image has the most contrasty look, and this is with its default autolevels off. There is a lot of detail overall, but it's a bit smooth under the dark area under the claw. The Capture One image is nice and sharp but suffers from a bit of stippling overall, which is a common issue with C1 Pro conversions where there's noise. This won't be visible when printed on a web press, but it will be if output on a high-resolution inkjet. The Lightroom conversion is very sharp and natural with the best preservation of detail, even in the transitions in the low-contrast shadow areas. Round 1: Lightroom.

Sports images are the worst. A high ISO and a night shot are the perfect storm for a difficult image to process. Aperture 1.1 already had decent noise suppression, and 2.0 doesn't disappoint here—this image, although still a little splotchy, has a very film-like quality with rich, even transitions and natural color but it's a bit soft because of the head-on collision of its noise reduction and sharpening filters. There is still chroma noise in the blacks, but at least it doesn't jump out like Madden circled it and said "enhance."

Bibble Pro clearly manages to suppress the noise the most. Capture One 4, like its predecessor, has the worst time with noisy images and suffers from patchy, unnatural transitions. If I lowered the chroma smoothing any, the image displayed nasty patches of color, and this Crayola-filled mess was the best I could do. This is the kind of image that makes me yearn for film and a drum scan. Lightroom looks good but doesn't have the pleasing film-like smoothness to the noise that Aperture and Bibble Pro produce, and there are unnatural blips popping up that will need to be manually removed.

A winner here is tough to call since each image has its strengths and faults and they will all need some retouching after conversion. I would say that the Bibble Pro image is my pick because the black ground and transitions are definitely going to be the least nasty when printing.

This one was tricky for Aperture because the more I tried to get rid of the luma noise in the dark red balloon, the more it obliterated the details in the other areas, so the overall result is soft and noisy. That also meant that I couldn't sharpen too much because it would just bring out the noise again. The Bibble Pro image looks good with smooth transitions overall, but with no radius setting in the default sharpen tool, it was hard to get the ideal sharpness. Capture One finally produces a great image that's super sharp with only a minor problem: the dark area in the red balloon is a bit flat. The Lightroom image is very good overall, but it gets patchy as the image clips to black. My pick here is the Capture One 4 image.

Now that the noise isn't an issue, Aperture produces very good low-noise results and is getting the smoothest transitions while still being sharp. The smoothness is a bit much in areas, though; if you look at the star-shaped tire rim on the back of the Jeep, you'll see how even with the Moire set to lowest, it's a bit flat. But Aperture isn't getting any harsh posterization in the red light like Bibble and Capture One are. Bibble Pro, unable to set the sharpen radius below 1.0, produces over-contrasty edges. They're not nearly the razor sharp lines that Capture One produces, if at the expense of smooth gradations and blips of detail. Lightroom looks really good and is getting the most detail and smoothest transition in the red light, but I'd say it's a toss-up between Aperture 2 and Lightroom overall with this image.

As you can see from the results, there isn't one perfect program for every scenario, but Aperture is doing a good job all around. When it comes to sharpening and denoise in combination, it falls dead flat, unfortunately. This is consistently its Achilles' heel, and I'm sad to see it not addressed in version 2.0. In my day-to-day work on images from feature films, I sharpen and denoise tons of images, and I guess I've just been spoiled by Noise Ninja. Hopefully now that Aperture 2 has a plug-in architecture (currently with no plug-ins), third parties will be able to address this shortfall themselves. Still, it would be better for Apple to fix it so we don't have to drop more money for a complete photo editor. Stay tuned.